State of Ajax for June 2008: Apple flexes Open Web muscles
Date : 2008 07 01 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianJune was a great month for the Open Web. First, Apple delivered a one-two punch with showing Mobile Me, powered by the native Web and SproutCore, and showing SquirrelFish as JavaScript starts to get a loooot faster on browsers. Firefox had a party as millions of people downloaded Firefox 3 final release, and immediately talked about 3.1 coming soon. The flywheel is moving. Opera 9.5 is also there, and IE 8 beta 2 is coming in August.
Velocity, the performance conference, also showed the interest in making the Web faster, as many tools were announced to help out us devs. We also saw a lot of cool uses of Canvas/SVG, as developers delve low level and see that they actually work very well.
So, we sit at the crux of two paths. On the one hand, browsers are getting faster and faster and adding great new technology for us (including small things like CSS variables. finally!). On the other hand, we are creating more compelling user experiences (e.g. 280 Slides, Mobile Me). These forces work with each other. As we do cooler apps that push the boundaries, the browsers have to come back with better performance and tools to match. Expectations are changing, and we need to match them.
Here is the full roundup:
Browsers
Flipping out over Safari IE 8 beta 2 coming in August X-UA-Compatible: IE=EmulateIE7 Mozilla Week: From Client (Firefox 3) to Server (Weave) to Mobile (Fennec) Opera gets proactive and helps you fix your code Browser Memory Footprints; Watching with real usage Browser News: IE, FF, Safari, and OperaStandards
New in standards: Acid4 and HTML 5 update W3C Progress Events 1.0 Working Draft OpenAjax Alliance white papers on Mobile Ajax and recent browser advancesPerformance
SquirrelFish: Details on the new SquirrelFish: Technical excitement String Performance in IE: Array.join vs += continued Is "finally" the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues? Jiffy Firebug Plugin: Fine grained calculation of performance timings YSlow now has Firefox 3 support Rendering performance in Canvas compared to SVG and VML Clientperf: Simple Client-Side Rails Performance KITE: Keynote's Internet Test Environment A Technique For Lazy Script Loading Velocity Conference Videos and SlidesJavaScript
An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript Javascript HTML Construction Benchmark The fight for cross domain XMLHttpRequest eval('foo=a', obj.fn); How you aren't private in Firefox Google Analytics after onLoad and document.write for XHTML Johnson: Wrapping JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace, and ARAX Gaia Widgets 3.0 "Glory" Audible Ajax Episode 27: SproutCore with Charles Jolley SproutCore: Being talked of as a Flash killer? Really? Apple, SproutCore, and Coherent modules.js: A New Stand-alone JavaScript Module Loader Mascara: Putting lipstick on JavaScript? Validanguage 0.9: More form validation SymbolicWeb: Ajax and Comet with Lisp dragtable: drag-and-drop reorderable columns for an HTML table Pingdom checks on JavaScript usage on top sites ensure: on demand resources Algebraic Data Types in JavaScriptExtJS
Leveraging Ext JS on the Server via Jaxer WiiExtJS: Building Ajax apps that run on the Wii Opera browserDojo
Badging Flickr with Dojo Dojo Firebug Lite: Beyond console.log Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime A Double Dose of Dojo Dojo gets AIM API Support from AOL Working with Web Services with ease; dojo.data and the WikipediaStoreYUI
YUI Autogrid: Correctly resize the gridsMooTools
MooTools 1.2 Released CNET Updates the Clientside MooTools Plugin RepositoryjQuery
jQuery UI 1.5: Effects, API, and Themes jQuery Release 1.2.6: Performance Improvements and Dimensions Plugin Added to Core Implementing infinite scrolling with jQuery jQuery Selectors Refcard Now Available Preloading Images with jQuery jsTree: jQuery-based JavaScript tree componentGears, AIR, and more
Gears 0.3 Released, and Google I/O videos on Ajax related content available Frizone: JavaScript dev, test, and deployment environment Frank Sinatra, Flash, and Ajax: Deckmyplace.com flXHR: Flash based XHR from flensed SEO and RIA get closer together with Flash indexing news Fluid.app gets another new buildDesign: CSS, SVG, Canvas
Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit 1.0 Using CSS transforms to Build a Coverflow Effect Mozilla Experiments with Applying SVG Effects to HTML Coda Slider Effect Algorithm Ink: Algorithm-driven Painting with Sharing and On-line Editing Photo Collages with Canvas CSS General Sibling Combinator in action CSS Variables are .... here! ShiftZoom: Zoomify your oversize images MooWheel and MooCirclePack for visualizations Hypno trip down the fractal rug Our Signal: Page Cloud Visualization of Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Hacker news Processing and ObsessingShowcases
Addressbook History goes into the cloud with App Engine Endpoint Resolver: JavaScript Library to hunt for Location redirects Acrobat.com: PDF and Flash sitting in a tree crossdomain.xml, Java, and JNLP Canvas Quest: Rogue like RPG game Yet Another Web 2.0 Button Generator PodiPodi: Enso / Quicksilver for the Web 72photos: Proto/Scripty Photo Sharing SiteUtilties
NitobiBug: Cross browser debugging JavaScript Protocol Fuzzer JSON Diff Released TileStack: HyperCard for the Web